I have to go shopping and I don’t want to, but it’s impossible not to, it’s too far gone now: I have to go. Have to pull myself out of here, when I am in the thick of things. So good to be in the thick of things again but I am reminded, again, by this having to deal with things like groceries, clean bath towels, comitments to others/dates (like the Cincinnati Fringe Festival show tonight), why and how it is so hard to be in that space in the first place: you have to be fierce to hold it, and in my case, fierceness punctures and the space dissipates.
I write these words now to transition out of the space, to prod myself towards the door.
I have been asked — many times — how I juggle work and writing/art and family and dailyness. My answer is that I don’t think I really do. But then, that’s not true: I must. For somehow it happens, it’s happening.
This is Robert Hass on the topic: (Smartish Pace, Poets Q & A):
Mark C., Columbus OH: Could you share about juggling family life and writing? Has the balance you’ve made between the two worked out OK for you, or has it been a frustration? It seems like the best writers I know personally have difficult family situations. For me it’s an interesting problem. Does one’s family situation influence one’s writing, or is it that one’s writing influences one’s family situation? Of course both are true, but I guess I would like to hear your take on, lets call it the correspondence, between these two things.
Robert Hass: It is, of course, difficult, Mark, to juggle family life and writing. Especially because it’s not really possible to make a living as a poet (unless you are one of a handful of songwriter-performer-poets). A couple of poets make livings as novelists, but most novelists don’t make livings as novelists, either. So, to be a writer in America, one needs to work hard at two jobs. The third part of that is family life. And since one has to show up for work the conflict occurs in the demands of writing life and family life. And then there is everything else, friendship, other interests, politics, citizenship, spiritual life, adventure. Kenneth Koch has written a poem which remarks that you can have art and love in your life, or art and friendship, but that you can’t really have all three. When I was beginning to write and beginning to raise a family, I so loved being inside the rhythms of family life and parenting, that it was mostly nourishing to me and it also gave me a subject matter. It was what made up the texture of my days, what gave me a life to think about. And, of course, it’s difficult. I’ve written about it directly and indirectly in my poems. Williams’s “Danse Russe” is a wonderful poem on one part of the subject. The connection between art and the soul’s loneliness, or maybe the word—it’s the one he uses–isn’t always right–each soul’s separate task–the part of the self that isn’t absorbed by other people’s needs or answered entirely by love of another–is the reason why there is a need to juggle family life and writing. Anyway, it’s difficult for me. I’ve never figured it out. Partly because it is my nature to be agreeable to others and to set aside what I’m doing, or at least that’s how I choose to see myself, and one problem with it is that one’s selfishness goes underground and is more difficult to pay attention to than the socially admirable parts of one’s character. Complicated: writing comes to be associated with the outlaw parts of the self, but one really needs an orderly, bourgeois life to get work done. Older, I find that the demands of family life are less, but the demands of community life and work life and social life greater, so the problem never really goes away. A work ethic as an artist seems the nearest thing to a solution.
This is Williams’ “Danse Russe” (to which Hass refers):
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,–
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,–
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
[c. 1917]